His latest riff came while your blogger-in-chief was off hiking in the Alps, but it’s come to my attention, so I wanted to share it…

Fly me to the Moon

The impresario of Excellence in Broadcasting told his ditto-heads of an alleged past visit of the Houston congresswoman to the Johnson Space Center, because, he said, “that’s her district.”

(Fact alert: It’s not her district. But it is moderately close to her district.)

According to El Rusho, SJL made this comment to NASA officials gathered during a past Mars mission –

“She said, ‘What, what, is it going to go where the astronauts planted the flag?’

“Of course, the staff of the Johnson Space Center said, ‘OK, we’ve got a woman here who doesn’t have the slightest idea that we are talking about Mars, not the Moon. How do we (a) not laugh and then how do we answer her question without embarrassing her because there are a lot of other people there?’”

Rush is wrong about the Johnson Space Center, too. According to Evan Smith — then the editor of Texas Monthly and now the boss at The Texas Tribune — Jackson Lee made her mistake at the Mars Pathfinder Operations Center in Pasadena, not the JSC.

Jackson Lee, whose district neighbors the Johnson Space Center, is a member of the House Committee on Science, and so it was that she spent part of her summer recess visiting the Mars Pathfinder Operations Center in Pasadena, California. While there, according to an article by Sandy Hume in The Hill, a weekly newspaper that covers Congress, Jackson Lee asked if the Pathfinder succeeded in taking pictures of the American flag planted on Mars by Neil Armstrong in 1969. Of course, Armstrong planted the flag on the Moon, as any high schooler should …

Smith wrote that SJL “allegedly uttered” the words because the congresswoman’s office pushed back against Hume’s report bigtime.

According to the Daily Caller’s not-very-flattering profile of the Texas lawmaker, her top aide accused the Capitol Hill publication of “bigotry“:

“You thought you could have fun with a black woman member of the Science Committee,” her then chief of staff wrote in a letter to the editor.

Whether Jackson Lee made the Mars remark remains uncertain, but this much is certain: It’s entered Texas (and DC) political lore.

Of course, the two outspoken figures have a long history of criticizing each other. When Limbaugh tried to become a partial owner of the National Football League’s St. Louis Rams, Jackson Lee called for the NFL to block the sale and accused him of racial insensitivity. Limbaugh over the years has had a field day with Jackson Lee’s political statements and, as he repeatedly has said, misstatements.